CHRIS KUTSCHERA 40 YEARS of JOURNALISM (Texts and Photos)

www.Chris-Kutschera.com

Kurdistan
Turkey: Revelations on the Ocalan
System

The
PKK, still fragmented and divided in the wake of the seizure
and imprisonment of its leader Abdullah Ocalan, staggers
on but for how long is a matter of conjecture.

Five or six of its original central committee have been
physically eliminated, three others committed suicide, eight
are still alive, acting semi-clandestinely, including

Selahattin Celik and Sukru Gulmus in Germany and Mahir
Walat in Moscow. Others have been driven underground.

Some of the survivors were among the founder members of
the PKK. Sukru Gulmus joined Ocalan’s movement as
early as 1977, even before the PKK was formally founded
in November 1978. Arrested by the Turks in February 1980
and sentenced to death, he spent 11 years in Diyarbakir’s
jail before being released on the grounds of ill health.

Selahattin Celik participated in the secret meetings which
preceded the foundation of the PKK and was one of the small
number of PKK leaders who organised the armed struggle and
the first military operations against Turkish army bases
on 15 August 1984, a historic date in the history of the
PKK.

Mahir
Walat and Selim Curukkaya became members of the PKK central
committee later on, in 1986 and 1991 respectively, but nevertheless
played an important role in the history of the party. A
role that cost Selim Curukkaya 11 years in Turkish prisons.

Mahir Walat ran the camp of Zaleh, a huge base on th Iraqi-Iranian
border where 2,000 men and women were trained as fighters
for the cause, before becoming the PKK representative in
Moscow, a post he continued to hold until Ocalan’s
capture.

However, the prestige these “old war horses”
once enjoyed has given way to disgrace. Victims of a campaign
of systematic denigration, they are now considered “traitors”
by the mass of Ocalan’s partisans.

A long history of dissidence and exclusions

The PKK, supposed to be monolithic, has a long history
of dissidence and exclusions: the first fissures inside
the central committee showed up with the second congress
(1982) and were followed by the first assassinations (Cetin
Gunger in 1984, Resul Altinak in 1985). But it was the third
congress (1986), in a Bekaa camp, which really marked the
beginning of an era of bloody repression comparable, in
a way, to the era of the great purges and Stalinist trials
of the Soviet Communist Party in 1937.

Arrested shortly before the congress, with Kesire Yildirim
(Ocalan’s wife) and Duran Kalkan, Selahattin Celik
spent three months in a cell where he had to write a report
of self-criticism on his “mistakes” before appearing
before a “court”. Relieved of his official position,
he was sent to Europe. At one time he shared his cell with
another member of the central committee, Halil Omer Can
(known under the alias of Terzi Djemal),
who was severely tortured by his former comrades. Halil
Omer Can nevertheless stayed with the PKK until the early
1990’s, when he became one of the three chiefs of
the HPP (PKK secret service) in charge of... killing the
dissident Mehmet Shener’s partisans regrouped in the
“PKK-Refoundation”. In spite of his cooperation
with Abdullah Ocalan, Terzi Djemal was finally arrested
and executed in 1993.

“There were between 50 and 60 executions just after
the 1986 congress”, claims Selahattin Celik. “In
the end, there was no more room to bury them. Some of them
were simple militants, Lebanese Kurds, accused of being
“agents”, guilty of “not implementing
orders”.

So why do these men, who yielded for years to Abdullah
Ocalan’s will, now denounce the excesses of a leader
they now compare with Mussolini, after years of revering
him like a “prophet”? “Abdullah Ocalan,
the man who used to call people “traitor” has
himself betrayed us”, says Selim Curukkaya who knows
that his revelations are now falling on more receptive ears.

All these opponents face huge material problems: full-time
militants, most of them have no professional training and
no means of making a living in Europe. In addition, they
face the ostracism of the PKK, which further isolates them
from their community. The arrival in Holland of Murat Karayilan,
a member of the “presidential council” sent
to Europe by Abdullah Ocalan to control an organisation
which showed alarming signs of division, and the release
of threatening press communiques against the “war
profiteer and traitors” probably foretell more settlings
of scores.

But it is obvious that while the opposition inside the
PKK in Europe can play a role by awakening Kurdish public
opinion -- temporarily stunned by Ocalan’s capture
and trial -- it is actually on the ground, in Kurdistan,
that the decisive events will take place. Already Hamili
Yildirim, military commander of Dersim and member of the
central committee, has refused to obey the orders of the
“presidential council” to stop fighting. On
9 January 2000 his men shot down a Sikorski helicopter,
killing six Turkish soldiers, including two officers, and
wounding four. And according to information released by
the PKK itself, more regional commanders are about to follow
suit.

The Turkish contra-guerrilla experts who have until now
superbly manipulated Abdullah Ocalan could realise very
quickly that the Kurdish leader jailed on Imrali island
does not hold all the keys of the Kurdish question -- unless
they are able to achieve their final aim and destroy the
PKK by persuading its members to kill each other.